The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Alastair Hamilton

The Apocryphal Apocalypse

The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Alastair Hamilton

Description

This is the first study of the reception of the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The author discusses the concepts of biblical apocrypha and canonicity in connection with the increasingly critical attitude to religious authority that developed with the humanists and intensified with the Reformation.

The Apocryphal Apocalypse

The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Alastair Hamilton

Table of Contents

1. From the Church Fathers to the Renaissance2. Prophecy and Kabbalism3. Official Attitudes4. Catholic Responses5. The Radical Solution: The Anabaptists6. A Broad Tradition of Dissent7. Rosicrucians, New Prophets and the Thirty Years War8. Radical Pietism and Eirenic Mysticism9. Of Monsters, Indians and Jews10. Controversialists and Scholars11. England and the Arabic Version12. The AftermathConclusionAppendix: 2 EsdrasBibliographyIndex of Biblical PassagesGeneral index